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Jobs and Income in the Current “Recovery”

AEIdeas‘ James Pethokoukis has some data in his article, “Obama’s low-wage jobs recovery.” He talked about the type of jobs being…created…in this so-called recovery; the graph below highlights his point.

There’s another aspect to this, though, and that’s the income implication of the type of jobs being created. I constructed the table below from the data in the graph above, using the mid-points of each industry type wage range and assuming a 2080 hour work year—that is, everyone, even the low-wage industry worker, either works all 52 weeks of the year or gets paid in full for vacation time, including holidays, to keep the arithmetic simple.

Wage Mid-Point

Jobs Lost (Thousands)

Jobs Gained (Thousands)

Not Jobs Gained (Thousands)

Net Annual Wages Gained/Lost (Thousands $)

High Wage:

$26.3250

(3,579)

2,603

(976)

($53,441,856)

Medium Wage:

$16.8650

(3,240)

2,282

(958)

($33,605,874)

Low Wage:

$11.4050

(1,973)

3,824

1,851

$43,910,162

Total:

($43,137,567)

You’re reading that right. The only net gain in income is in the low end industries; these folks, by being able to go back to work, have gotten a net increase of some $44 billion in their annual income. But that’s swamped by the losses in the other two categories, and the nation as a whole has lost some $43 billion in annual income.